Pluralistic ignorance

Pluralistic ignorance occurs when people privately reject a norm but mistakenly believe others accept it. Their outward conformity can make the norm appear more widely supported than it is.

Conformity: Conformity is the adjustment of beliefs or behavior to match a group’s real or perceived expectations. People may conform outwardly while privately rejecting the norm they think others accept.
Princeton sexual norms study: A 1950s study of Princeton students’ private attitudes toward premarital sex and their estimates of classmates’ views. Students underestimated peers’ private acceptance of premarital sex while believing they were more conservative.
Social norms intervention: A communication strategy that changes behavior by correcting inaccurate beliefs about what peers commonly do or approve. It directly targets inflated estimates of others’ acceptance of a harmful norm.
Collective action: Collective action is coordinated effort by multiple people to pursue a shared goal. People may fail to challenge a norm when they wrongly expect others to oppose change.
Floyd H. Allport: Floyd H. Allport was an American social psychologist whose work helped establish experimental social psychology. His 1924 textbook introduced the term “pluralistic ignorance” for group-level misperception.
Social norms: Social norms are shared expectations about appropriate behavior within a group. Pluralistic ignorance concerns mistaken beliefs about how widely a norm is accepted.
Bystander effect: The bystander effect is the reduced likelihood of helping when other people are present. In ambiguous emergencies, observers may read others’ inaction as evidence that intervention is unnecessary.
Descriptive norms: Descriptive norms are perceptions of what most people actually do in a given situation. Beliefs about others’ behavior can be mistaken even when private attitudes are more accepting.
Abilene paradox: The Abilene paradox describes a group’s decision to take an action that members privately oppose because each misreads the others. Both involve mistaken beliefs about group preferences, but the paradox centers on a shared unwanted decision.
Daniel Katz: Daniel Katz was an American social psychologist known for research on attitudes, public opinion, and social behavior. His research with Floyd Allport helped develop the concept through studies of college students’ attitudes.

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